How to Become a Digital Artist in 2024

Have you ever dreamt of how to become a digital artist? In this article, we are going to explore digital art, why it’s becoming so popular, and the different types of digital art that exist. Then we will discover what you need to do in order to become a digital artist in 2024.

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What is Digital Art?

Digital art is artwork that is created using non-traditional digital means. So forget good old-fashioned paper and paints! Digital art is created on laptops, tablets, or even smartphones. Often, it’s also not ever printed, and is always stored on a device to be shared digitally. Of course, you can create digital artwork and print it afterwards. This is important to know if you want to become a digital artist.

What is a Digital Artist?

A Digital Artist is exactly the same thing as a regular artist. Except they create their artwork using technology and software, rather than more traditional mediums such as paint or pencils. However, just like regular artists cover a whole spectrum of different styles, so do digital artists. You might get one digital artist that specialises in graphic realistic renderings of architecture. And another entirely different digital artist that hand draws cartoon images for children’s books. If you want to become a digital artist, it’s important to look into all the different types of digital art styles available. Digital art has a whole bunch of sub-categories of its own! 

Why is Digital Art Becoming Popular?

Digital art is becoming increasingly popular due to the obvious accessibility of technology. But also because of how incredible some programmes are at creating beautiful art pieces. Artists have more tools at their fingertips than ever before, and don’t need a crazy amount of space, or to get their hands dirty whilst creating their masterpieces. In fact, a lot of digital art can be created anywhere using only one or two gadgets. Like a laptop or a tablet. Never before have artists been able to go to a coffee shop and create for hours on end without anyone even realising what they’re doing! If you want to become a digital artist, technology has made it easier than ever!

Digital art is also evergreen. It’s evergreen in the fact that it can be recreated, redistributed, and reprinted over and over again without losing any quality and with minimal effort. This is one of the other reasons that digital art is becoming so popular. Because digital artists can create one piece of art and share it with lots of people, without having to try to replicate the art piece from scratch over and over again. 

Types of Digital Art

Earlier on, I wrote briefly about Digital Artists, and how there are a whole host of different types of digital artists, creating a whole bunch of different styles of art.

Below I’m going to list a few of the different types of digital art you might come across if you want to become a digital artist:

• Digital Painting
• Vector Art
• 3D Modelling
• Pixel Art
• Animation

What is Digital Painting?

Digital painting is when an artist uses a stylus (such as an Apple Pencil*, for example) as a ‘paintbrush’ to create a piece of art on a screen – usually a tablet. You can also do this with a mouse on a desktop or laptop, but it provides much less control than using a stylus would. 

Digital painting also requires the artist to have some form of software. Such as Photoshop, or Procreate (which is what I use) to act as their ‘canvas’. 

What is Vector Art?

Vector Art is a specific type of art which uses mathematics and algorithms to create drawings and illustrations. Mainly using shapes, curves and lines. 

These types of art allow artists and designers to create pieces that are scalable – no matter how much you blow them up, or shrink them down, their quality never changes. Their lines are always crisp and sharp. For this reason, vector art is super popular for creating logos, infographics, and other types of marketing material. 

What is 3D Modelling?

3D Modelling is when an artist creates a three dimensional ‘drawing’ of an object. 3D shapes are usually created with different types of software, such as AutoCAD. It’s very popular with designers, architects, video game designers, and animators. You might find an example of a 3D Model in your daily life. When I went to get my kitchen upgraded, the showroom created a 3D model of my upgraded kitchen so I could see what it would look like once completed. 

What is Pixel Art?

Pixel Art is a type of digital art where larger images are created using small pixels as the building blocks. Although pixel art might seem laborious to create, it allows the artist to create high resolution, very accurate and detailed pieces of art. 

What is Animation?

I feel like most people might know what animation is – we see it all the time. But seeing something all the time doesn’t necessarily mean we know what it is, or what goes into creating it. 

Animation is the use of images displayed in quick succession which makes the image appear as if it’s moving. Animation has undergone a huge transformation over the decades. Not to say that traditional forms don’t still exist and are being used. But there are now many more digital options which allow people to easily create animated images.  

How to Become a Digital Artist

Becoming a digital artist isn’t necessarily something that you need to ‘announce’ or pass some specific exam which proclaims you are now an ‘official digital artist’. The journey to becoming a digital artist doesn’t even need to start with anyone requesting your artwork. Or being paid for it. 

If you want to become a digital artist, it begins when you really start to practice your art style and start to understand what niche you create art within. 

Once you start to practice to become a digital artist, you can decide what kind of digital artist you are or want to be. You might even have in mind already what kind of art you want to create. But it’s always good to still practice and try different things because you might surprise yourself.

Below we’ll cover off some points which will help you on your way to becoming a digital artist in 2024 and beyond. 

Do I need to be good at drawing to become a Digital Artist?

I think this is probably the number one question people have when they think about becoming a digital artist. What if my drawings aren’t good enough? 

The short answer is; no, you don’t need to be good at drawing to become a Digital Artist. The biggest thing you need to become a digital artist is creativity, and an understanding of your art style. Some of the best art pieces in the world aren’t necessarily photo perfect pictures. They can be abstract, or cartoonish, or minimalistic, or even written stylised quotes.

Of course, there are some artists that have a natural ability to draw lifelike objects or people. And that’s amazing too. But you don’t need to have this skill in order to be a successful artist. This is why it’s so important to practice and play around with different styles to see what comes naturally to you, and what you enjoy doing. Just like any other skill, the more you do it, the better you become. The same is true for digital art, and drawing. 

Find the right software for you

There are a vast amount of options out there that you can use to create your digital art work. And which software and/or device you use is going to be dependent on your art style. 

For example, I largely create freehand digital drawings using procreate. So an iPad*, Apple Pencil*, and the Procreate app are perfect for me. They allow me to create the type of art that I want. However, someone who wants to become a digital artist who likes to create intricate graphic designs, or architectural drawings, for example might be better using a laptop or desktop with Adobe Illustrator software.

Find Your Niche

It can be easy, especially when you’re starting out and decide to become a digital artist, to want to draw anything and everything. To use lots of different types of mediums, and to flex between colourful pieces, and monochromatic pieces. This is a really cool time. And I feel like it’s important for everyone to have their creative time to figure out what they like, and what suits them. I spoke about this earlier on in this post. 

But once you’ve had this time, and you start to get an understanding of what you like to draw, and how you like to draw it, try to stick with it for a while. 

This isn’t to put yourself ‘in a box’ as such. But more to allow you deepen your ability within that niche. If you spread yourself too thin across too many styles, you’ll really struggle to master one. You’ll end up wanting to bang your head against a brick wall because you’ll feel like you’re not getting any better. 

Practice ALL The Time

When you first start drawing, it’s all you want to do. You’ll be picking up your drawing tech all the time and tinkering around with different things, and become engrossed. But, no matter how much you love creating, there will come a time where you start to lean out of the hobby a little. It’s the same with picking up any new hobby. This is when it’s important not to let yourself fall out of the habit. If you want to become a digital artist, it’s not about motivation, it’s about discipline. There will be times you cannot wait to draw. And there will be times that you really can’t be bothered. 

Just make a deal with yourself that you will practice for XX amount of minutes, hours (or whatever) per day / week. And stick to it. This is the best way to become a digital artist.

The more you practice, the better you will become, and the easier you’ll find it to create.

Monetising Your Digital Art

Once you start understanding your niche and creating some art pieces, you might start thinking about finding a way to sell them. Or you might decide you want to work for a business that employs digital artists. Below we’ll talk about the different ways you can ‘work’ as a digital artist and how you can start! 

Employed vs Freelance

The first question you probably want to ask yourself when you become a digital artist is ‘do I want to work for myself, or do I want to work for someone else’. 

As you can probably imagine, there are pros and cons to each of these avenues. A lot of people automatically assume that artists or designers of any type are self-employed or freelance – and for the most part, that’s probably true – but there is also the option to become an artist or designer for another company as well. And it’s a route a lot of people seem to forget. We’ll go through both options below. This way, you can get any idea of what is going to work best for you. 

Pros of Becoming a Freelance Digital Artist

The pros of becoming a freelance artist are vast and varied. When people decide to become a digital artist, this is usually how they picture it. Let’s take a look at some of them. 

You have more creative freedom

You’re not tied to what someone else wants you to create when you work for yourself. You can basically create the type of art you’re passionate about. And potential buyers and consumers of that art will come to you. Ok, if you decide to go down the commission route, where you create art pieces that people have requested, you might have to do what someone else has asked you to do. But you can do it in YOUR style. And, at the end of the day, if you don’t want to create what they’ve requested, you can always politely decline. 

You have more physical freedom

Working for yourself when you become a digital artist means that you make the rules. You decide when you’re going to work. Where you’re going to work. And how long for. If you prefer to work during the evening, and use your daytimes for other errands, then go for it! When you have a dentist appointment in the middle of the day, then you don’t need to request any time off. If you prefer to work from a coffee shop a few days per week, no one is going to ask you any questions. And if you prefer to work from your bed – then lovely! Physical freedom is in abundance when you work for yourself. 

You can have more financial freedom

Now this one is of course going to come with a huge caveat. Which is that, naturally, you will need to work harder (or smarter) in order to earn more money. When you become a digital artist, it isn’t just going to come to you. However once you are in a position that you are earning money consistently, you can then be in control as to how far this earning goes.

The harder you work, the more you market your work, the more you can earn. Again – this is all dependent on your niche, your skill level, your level of effort, and sometimes, sadly, just luck. But what I’m trying to say is, that when you work for someone else, you earn a salary which is set. When you work for yourself, you can grow your earnings with harder work. Beware, this does also go the other way, which I’ll discuss more below.

You can learn so much

When you work for yourself, you’re constantly coming up against new scenarios, new projects, and new clients (plus so much more!) This presents plenty of opportunities to learn new skills all the time. Not just digital art skills, but also business skills in general, and how to run one. When you’re self-employed, that’s effectively what you’re doing – running a business. 

Cons of Becoming a Freelance Digital Artist

Just as fabulous as it can be to be a freelance digital artist, it can also be incredibly daunting and have setbacks. But what are these?

Money can be a problem

When you’re first starting out, you probably have grand plans of what you’d like to do, what you’d like to create, and what you want your days to look like. Unfortunately, this can all start to become a little bit challenging when you don’t have the money coming in, and start to realise how difficult it can be to make it happen. You don’t just post your art online and then flocks of people come running to buy it. Sometimes it can take weeks, months, YEARS and for some artists, it just never happens. They are never able to earn a full time wage from their craft.

This is a massive setback to becoming a freelance full time digital artist. It’s one of the reasons most people are scared to even give it a go. Even if you do make a full time wage one month, you’re not necessarily guaranteed to make the same the next month. For this reason, becoming a full time freelance digital artist can be hugely daunting and anxiety inducing. 

You can’t have an ‘off’ day

Have you ever been employed, gone into work and just not felt like giving it your all that day? Perhaps you didn’t get enough sleep the night before. Or you have a lot on your mind. Perhaps you just simply can’t be bothered that day. So you do the bare minimum so as to not get fired. You might even do this a few days in a row, or quite regularly at work. It would probably take a little while for your employer to notice, so you can carry on this facade for a while unnoticed. And guess what? – you’ll still get paid at the end of the month. 

This can not be the case if you’re a freelance digital artist. If you have ‘off day’ after ‘off day’ as a freelance digital artist, you will find that your money starts to dwindle. People stop buying your art. People start forgetting to check your page. You start to lose followers, subscribers or Patreons. And this all leads back to how much money you’ll earn. You can’t afford to have an ‘off day’ or a ‘lazy day’ all the time. Sure, if your business is solid, and you’ve got a lot of automation in place, then you can plan downtime. But if this happens regularly, without any contingency planning, you’ll see your business start to suffer. 

Your schedule isn’t rigid

For all the reasons this could be a positive, it can also be a negative. When you work for yourself, you don’t necessarily have a 9-5 (unless you’re super strict with yourself), but let’s face it, most people aren’t. And the beauty of being a freelance digital artist is that you can fit your life around your work. 

But, when your schedule isn’t rigid, your work can start interfering with your life. And you might start finding it hard to focus on when you should be ‘working’ i.e. creating, and when you can relax. You might find yourself getting behind in your work. Or this could go the other way, and you might start finding yourself working too much and never having a day off. 

You have to learn more than how to create art

As I stated before in the ‘pros’ list – when you work for yourself, you’re no longer just an ‘artist’. You’re a business owner. You need to learn how to work out your finances. How to do your marketing and social media. What you need to do to keep a track of your expenses. How to create a website. How to provide great client/customer service. Plus a whole host of other things.

This can be very rewarding, and a great opportunity to learn lots of new skills. But it can be a hell of a lot to juggle if you’ve never done it before. And you’ll have to ensure you’ve set aside enough time to perform all of these tasks often. You might have romanticised your life; sitting in your home studio creating beautiful art all day. But you will be doing a lot of mundane and, sometimes, frustrating and boring things too. You must be prepared to wear a lot of hats!

Pros of Becoming an Employed Digital Artist

You have guaranteed income each month

When you’re an employed digital artist, there is no fear about who is going to buy your art, or where your next commission is going to come from. Your employer is paying you a salary for simply just being there and creating the art. You don’t need to worry about marketing, finding clients, or keeping your personal portfolio up to date. Your employer or their client will give you the requirements. You create the art, and then get paid the same amount every month. 

You can focus on just creating art

One of the things I mentioned previously about becoming a freelance digital artist was the requirement to learn additional skills in order to run your business. Creating art was just a small part of it. This is completely different if you’re an employed digital artist or graphic designer. Your company employs you solely to create the art pieces. You don’t need to worry about finances, keeping your accounts, marketing, creating and running a website, or anything else. If your goal is just to create art all day, every day, and not have to worry about anything else, being an employed digital artist could be the path for you. 

Work/life balance can be better

When you work for someone else, you generally work on the clock, meaning you have set hours. For a lot of companies, this is 9-5 (or some variation of). For a lot of people, this may seem stifling, but a massive benefit of this is that you know what your set hours are. You aren’t going to be working into the small hours of the night, or on the weekend (which you might be doing if you are a freelance digital artist). This can create a much better work/life balance for those who struggle to divide the lines between their job and their home life. 

Cons of Becoming an Employed Digital Artist

It could get boring

When you have a steady, stable job with an employer, it can feel very secure – which is a good thing for a lot of people. The trouble is, when you work for the same company for a long time, even if you’re creating work for a bunch of different clients within that company, a lot of the work is going to be similar. You will also be doing nothing but creating. This is different if you’re freelance – where you have lots of different hats to wear and there is more variation. Not just in the roles that you do (accounting, marketing, website creation), but also in the type of art that you create. 

Your income is set

Having a set income when you’re employed can be great. You know exactly what is coming in each month, and you can plan ahead and make sure you have enough to cover your bills, and everything else that makes up your life. 

The problem with this is, there isn’t often the ability to earn any extra like there is when you’re a freelance digital artist. If you want to earn more money when you’re freelance, you can just take on another project, or work a few more hours. You can’t necessarily do this when you’re employed. Your work is your work and you’re paid a salary for it. 

You have set hours every day

Just like having set hours every day can be a good thing (I mentioned it in one of the previous points), it can also be a negative. If you have set hours to work every day, it makes it very difficult to have flexibility to do other things. When you are employed, you sign a contract and are effectively trading your skills, but also your time for a monetary sum. In order to get paid, you have to spend the time working. This leaves very little flexibility for you to get things done during the day, and you may find yourself ‘living for the weekends’. 

Decide How You Want to Share Your Digital Artwork

If you want to become a full time digital artist, no matter what route you decide to take, I’m sure you’ll want to find a way to share your art with the world. 

There are lots of different options to do this. You can:

• Start a blog and share your ideas and thoughts and intersperse those with your art pieces
• Create a website portfolio
• Create an online shop – whether that’s your own shop through a site like Shopify, or on a marketplace like Etsy
• Grow your social media following – post photos of your art on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or Pinterest. Better still – create interesting videos showcasing how you created these pieces or how you got into art
• Attend craft fairs – if you prefer face to face contact with people, this could be a great medium to meet people and share your work 
• Join DeviantArt – one of the largest online social networks for artists and art enthusiasts, and a platform for emerging and established artists to exhibit, promote, and share their works with an enthusiastic, art-centric community

Conclusion

It’s clear that there are lots of ways to become a digital artist in 2024. And so many ways to share your art with the world, whether you decide to join an existing company as an employee, or branch out on your own as a freelance digital artist. However you decide to share your digital art with the world, it’s clear that this particular type of art is only becoming more and more popular. Make sure you do your research, find out what is going to work best for you and your lifestyle, and then just give it a try! You never know until you just start something whether you’re going to like it or not! 

And if you enjoyed this article, and think other people might find it useful too, please do share it on your social media – or even send a link to a friend so they can read it too. It means a lot to me and my little corner here on the internet 🙂